Michael Neocosmos
Biographic Data
| ID | 92524 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Neocosmos |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Neocosmos |
| SIGNATURE | NEOCOSMOS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rhodes University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1316-7427 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 141 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Popular Sovereignty versus State Sovereignty: Haiti, Popular Equality and the Birth of the Neocolonial State
Through a review of the two works below, I discuss how the Saint Domingue/Haiti Revolutions clarify the history of the opposition between popular sovereignty and state sovereignty. The people and the state developed as distinct political actors throughout the nineteenth century in particular. The former constructed a completely new society founded on egalitarian norms influenced by African cultures. The latter failed to establish its sovereignty …
African Politics of Survival Extraversion and Informality in the Contemporary World
The academic intellectual as knowing subject and the reason of the excluded: A response to Mahmood Mamdani
Mamdani’s review of my book Thinking Freedom in Africa remains within the analytical binaries which characterise his thinking. As a result he fails completely to comprehend my argument. The problem is compounded by the fact that he seems, at best, to have read the book only partially. I do not oppose “differences” to “universal humanity”, but argue that in order to understand a politics of emancipation on the African continent, one must begin fro…
Thinking Freedom in Africa: Toward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics
Previous ways of conceiving the universal emancipation of humanity have in practice ended in failure. Marxism, anti-colonial nationalism and neo-liberalism all understand the achievement of universal emancipation through a form of state politics. Marxism, which had encapsulated the idea of freedom for most of the twentieth century, was found wanting when it came to thinking emancipation because social interests and identities were understood as s…
The Creolization of Political Theory and the Dialectic of Emancipatory Thought: A Plea for Synthesis
The paper discusses Jane-Anna Gordon's important idea of the Creolization of Poitical Theory with reference to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Frantz Fanon. It makes an argument for synthesizing this initiative with dialectical thought in order to transcend the analytical vision which gave birth to the creolizing of theory. This synthesis is proposed in order to make sense of the real of any politics of universal emancipation and to incorpo…
Thinking Freedom in Africa: Toward a theory of emancipatory politics
Constructing the domain of freedom: Thinking politics at a distance from the state
Political emancipation in the twenty-first century must be conceived and achieved through establishing a ‘distance’ from the state and its practices. This article argues that in order to begin to understand politics ‘at a distance from the state’, we need to first understand politics as a collective thought-practice. The thought of an emancipatory politics exists only when collective subjectivities exceed the limits imposed by social place, ident…
The Sociology of Crisis and the Crisis of Sociology: Academic Marxism and the Absence of a Thought of Politics in South Africa
From 'Foreign Natives' to 'Native Foreigners: Explaining Xenophobia in Post-apartheid South Africa - Citizenship and Nationalism, Identity and Politics
Political Subjectivity and the Subject of Politics: Thinking Beyond Identity from the South of Africa
If the idea behind the thinking of politics is to overcome the subjective and objective limits of our current world, dominated as it is by capitalism and all its oppressive ramifications; in other words, if the idea is to make possible a politics of emancipation in Africa, it is imperative to develop concepts and categories which make alternatives thinkable and thereby possible. Moreover, if currently hegemonic perspectives make it impossible to …
Are Those-Who-Do-Not-Count Capable of Reason? Thinking Political Subjectivity in the (Neo-)Colonial World and the Limits of History
This article is concerned to show that the historical science of the (neo-)colonial world is unable to allow for an analysis of the political subjectivities of 'those-who-do-not-count' or 'subalterns' as rational beings. Rather, it can only think such subjectivities as the products of people who are merely bearers of their social location, not thinking subjects. As a result, such history can only be a history of place, not a history of the transc…
The Nation and Its Politics: Fanon, Emancipatory Nationalism, and Political Sequences
In order to make our period legible, it is important to also make earlier periods legible. The sequence of national liberation struggles in Africa that cohered around a particular set of political subjectivities emphasizing freedom, justice, equality, and the affirmation of a total humanity has now ended and consequently it has become more difficult to orient our thoughts around issues of emancipatory politics and their possible forms. The absenc…
The Contradictory Position of 'Tradition' in African Nationalist Discourse: Some Analytical and Political Reflections
In the immediate post-colonial period, 'tradition' was seen by African national ism both as the basis of an authentic indigenous culture to be celebrated and opposed to a hegemonic Western (globalised) culture, and as a backward for mation created (or manipulated) by Western (neo) colonialism to divide and rule and thus as inimical to 'modern' nation-state formation. An idealised tradition thus held a contradictory location within what came to be…
Analysing Political Subjectivities: Naming the Post-developmental State in Africa Today
Politics, whether that of the state or that constituted beyond the state, must be analysed as thought, as subjectivity. This article proposes to do so in connection with state politics in Africa since independence. It consists of a brief theoretical justification for such a perspective, a methodological stress on the process of elucidating the names around which such politics is deployed, and an application of these conceptions to the politics of…
The Politics of Fear and the Fear of Politics: Reflections on Xenophobic Violence in South Africa
Reflecting on the causes of the recent xenophobic pogroms in South Africa, it is striking how most commentators have stressed poverty and deprivation as the underlying causes of the events. Yet it requires little effort to see that economic factors, however real, cannot possibly account for why it was those deemed to be non-South Africans who bore the brunt of the vicious attacks. Poverty can be and has historically been the foundation for the wh…
Can a human rights culture enable emancipation? Clearing some theoretical ground for the renewal of a critical sociology
A critical sociology, a sociology which is alive rather than moribund, has only existed as a result of the imagining of an emancipatory project of one form or other. At least from the rationalist project of the Enlightenment which wished to liberate thought from religious dogma, to the critique of capitalism and the imagining of an alternative in the 19th century, to the critique of ‘actually existing socialism’ in May 1968, to the imagining of f…
Neo-Liberalism Versus State Nationalism: Beyond State Thinking in Southern Africa
Development, Social Citizenship and Human Rights: Re-thinking the Political Core of an Emancipatory Project in Africa
The paper begins from the axiomatic point that, despite the form it eventually took, namely that of a neo-colonial process, development was understood and fought for in Africa as [part of] an emancipatory political project central to the liberatory vision of the pan-African nationalism which emerged victorious at independence. Indeed independence was always seen, by radical nationalism in particular, as only the first step towards freedom and lib…
"The Agrarian Question in Southern Africa and "Accumulation from below: Economics and Politics in the Struggle for Democracy
Democratisation is on the agenda in Africa, but as the author stresses, this is not just a political question. Alternative forms of accumulation from below must be addressed, and this he does against the backdrop of the historical experiences of Southern Africa
"The Agrarian Question in Southern Africa and "Accumulation from below: Economics and Politics in the Struggle for Democracy
The agrarian question and class contradictions in South Africa: Some theoretical considerations
The article first considers two dominant approaches to black rural social formations in South Africa, those of neo-classical populism and radical political economy, examining their ideology and politics as well as their theoretical inadequacies. The major part of the article then provides a general interpretation of the theory and politics of the agrarian question in Marxism, which has strategic implications for the current phase of national demo…
Marx's third class: Capitalist landed property and capitalist development
This article consists of a detailed discussion of Marx's theorisation of a landed class in the capitalist mode of production. It is argued that Marx does not consider landlords as feudal leftovers but does indeed succeed in providing a sophisticated theory of capitalist landed property as an independent class, which conforms in all major respects with his theorisation of capital and wage-labour. Moreover, the role of landed property in the proces…
The Politics of Fear and the Fear of Politics: Reflections on Xenophobic Violence in South Africa
Reflecting on the causes of the recent xenophobic pogroms in South Africa, it is striking how most commentators have stressed poverty and deprivation as the underlying causes of the events. Yet it requires little effort to see that economic factors, however real, cannot possibly account for why it was those deemed to be non-South Africans who bore the brunt of the vicious attacks. Poverty can be and has historically been the foundation for the wh…
Marx's third class: Capitalist landed property and capitalist development
This article consists of a detailed discussion of Marx's theorisation of a landed class in the capitalist mode of production. It is argued that Marx does not consider landlords as feudal leftovers but does indeed succeed in providing a sophisticated theory of capitalist landed property as an independent class, which conforms in all major respects with his theorisation of capital and wage-labour. Moreover, the role of landed property in the proces…
The agrarian question and class contradictions in South Africa: Some theoretical considerations
The article first considers two dominant approaches to black rural social formations in South Africa, those of neo-classical populism and radical political economy, examining their ideology and politics as well as their theoretical inadequacies. The major part of the article then provides a general interpretation of the theory and politics of the agrarian question in Marxism, which has strategic implications for the current phase of national demo…
"The Agrarian Question in Southern Africa and "Accumulation from below: Economics and Politics in the Struggle for Democracy
Democratisation is on the agenda in Africa, but as the author stresses, this is not just a political question. Alternative forms of accumulation from below must be addressed, and this he does against the backdrop of the historical experiences of Southern Africa
Are Those-Who-Do-Not-Count Capable of Reason? Thinking Political Subjectivity in the (Neo-)Colonial World and the Limits of History
This article is concerned to show that the historical science of the (neo-)colonial world is unable to allow for an analysis of the political subjectivities of 'those-who-do-not-count' or 'subalterns' as rational beings. Rather, it can only think such subjectivities as the products of people who are merely bearers of their social location, not thinking subjects. As a result, such history can only be a history of place, not a history of the transc…
Analysing Political Subjectivities: Naming the Post-developmental State in Africa Today
Politics, whether that of the state or that constituted beyond the state, must be analysed as thought, as subjectivity. This article proposes to do so in connection with state politics in Africa since independence. It consists of a brief theoretical justification for such a perspective, a methodological stress on the process of elucidating the names around which such politics is deployed, and an application of these conceptions to the politics of…
"The Agrarian Question in Southern Africa and "Accumulation from below: Economics and Politics in the Struggle for Democracy
The Creolization of Political Theory and the Dialectic of Emancipatory Thought: A Plea for Synthesis
The paper discusses Jane-Anna Gordon's important idea of the Creolization of Poitical Theory with reference to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Frantz Fanon. It makes an argument for synthesizing this initiative with dialectical thought in order to transcend the analytical vision which gave birth to the creolizing of theory. This synthesis is proposed in order to make sense of the real of any politics of universal emancipation and to incorpo…
Constructing the domain of freedom: Thinking politics at a distance from the state
Political emancipation in the twenty-first century must be conceived and achieved through establishing a ‘distance’ from the state and its practices. This article argues that in order to begin to understand politics ‘at a distance from the state’, we need to first understand politics as a collective thought-practice. The thought of an emancipatory politics exists only when collective subjectivities exceed the limits imposed by social place, ident…
The Sociology of Crisis and the Crisis of Sociology: Academic Marxism and the Absence of a Thought of Politics in South Africa
Political Subjectivity and the Subject of Politics: Thinking Beyond Identity from the South of Africa
If the idea behind the thinking of politics is to overcome the subjective and objective limits of our current world, dominated as it is by capitalism and all its oppressive ramifications; in other words, if the idea is to make possible a politics of emancipation in Africa, it is imperative to develop concepts and categories which make alternatives thinkable and thereby possible. Moreover, if currently hegemonic perspectives make it impossible to …
The Contradictory Position of 'Tradition' in African Nationalist Discourse: Some Analytical and Political Reflections
In the immediate post-colonial period, 'tradition' was seen by African national ism both as the basis of an authentic indigenous culture to be celebrated and opposed to a hegemonic Western (globalised) culture, and as a backward for mation created (or manipulated) by Western (neo) colonialism to divide and rule and thus as inimical to 'modern' nation-state formation. An idealised tradition thus held a contradictory location within what came to be…
Neo-Liberalism Versus State Nationalism: Beyond State Thinking in Southern Africa
Development, Social Citizenship and Human Rights: Re-thinking the Political Core of an Emancipatory Project in Africa
The paper begins from the axiomatic point that, despite the form it eventually took, namely that of a neo-colonial process, development was understood and fought for in Africa as [part of] an emancipatory political project central to the liberatory vision of the pan-African nationalism which emerged victorious at independence. Indeed independence was always seen, by radical nationalism in particular, as only the first step towards freedom and lib…
Marx's third class: Capitalist landed property and capitalist development
This article consists of a detailed discussion of Marx's theorisation of a landed class in the capitalist mode of production. It is argued that Marx does not consider landlords as feudal leftovers but does indeed succeed in providing a sophisticated theory of capitalist landed property as an independent class, which conforms in all major respects with his theorisation of capital and wage-labour. Moreover, the role of landed property in the proces…
The agrarian question and class contradictions in South Africa: Some theoretical considerations
The article first considers two dominant approaches to black rural social formations in South Africa, those of neo-classical populism and radical political economy, examining their ideology and politics as well as their theoretical inadequacies. The major part of the article then provides a general interpretation of the theory and politics of the agrarian question in Marxism, which has strategic implications for the current phase of national demo…
"The Agrarian Question in Southern Africa and "Accumulation from below: Economics and Politics in the Struggle for Democracy
Democratisation is on the agenda in Africa, but as the author stresses, this is not just a political question. Alternative forms of accumulation from below must be addressed, and this he does against the backdrop of the historical experiences of Southern Africa
"The Agrarian Question in Southern Africa and "Accumulation from below: Economics and Politics in the Struggle for Democracy
Development, Social Citizenship and Human Rights: Re-thinking the Political Core of an Emancipatory Project in Africa
The paper begins from the axiomatic point that, despite the form it eventually took, namely that of a neo-colonial process, development was understood and fought for in Africa as [part of] an emancipatory political project central to the liberatory vision of the pan-African nationalism which emerged victorious at independence. Indeed independence was always seen, by radical nationalism in particular, as only the first step towards freedom and lib…
Neo-Liberalism Versus State Nationalism: Beyond State Thinking in Southern Africa
Can a human rights culture enable emancipation? Clearing some theoretical ground for the renewal of a critical sociology
A critical sociology, a sociology which is alive rather than moribund, has only existed as a result of the imagining of an emancipatory project of one form or other. At least from the rationalist project of the Enlightenment which wished to liberate thought from religious dogma, to the critique of capitalism and the imagining of an alternative in the 19th century, to the critique of ‘actually existing socialism’ in May 1968, to the imagining of f…
The Politics of Fear and the Fear of Politics: Reflections on Xenophobic Violence in South Africa
Reflecting on the causes of the recent xenophobic pogroms in South Africa, it is striking how most commentators have stressed poverty and deprivation as the underlying causes of the events. Yet it requires little effort to see that economic factors, however real, cannot possibly account for why it was those deemed to be non-South Africans who bore the brunt of the vicious attacks. Poverty can be and has historically been the foundation for the wh…
Analysing Political Subjectivities: Naming the Post-developmental State in Africa Today
Politics, whether that of the state or that constituted beyond the state, must be analysed as thought, as subjectivity. This article proposes to do so in connection with state politics in Africa since independence. It consists of a brief theoretical justification for such a perspective, a methodological stress on the process of elucidating the names around which such politics is deployed, and an application of these conceptions to the politics of…
The Nation and Its Politics: Fanon, Emancipatory Nationalism, and Political Sequences
In order to make our period legible, it is important to also make earlier periods legible. The sequence of national liberation struggles in Africa that cohered around a particular set of political subjectivities emphasizing freedom, justice, equality, and the affirmation of a total humanity has now ended and consequently it has become more difficult to orient our thoughts around issues of emancipatory politics and their possible forms. The absenc…
The Contradictory Position of 'Tradition' in African Nationalist Discourse: Some Analytical and Political Reflections
In the immediate post-colonial period, 'tradition' was seen by African national ism both as the basis of an authentic indigenous culture to be celebrated and opposed to a hegemonic Western (globalised) culture, and as a backward for mation created (or manipulated) by Western (neo) colonialism to divide and rule and thus as inimical to 'modern' nation-state formation. An idealised tradition thus held a contradictory location within what came to be…
Political Subjectivity and the Subject of Politics: Thinking Beyond Identity from the South of Africa
If the idea behind the thinking of politics is to overcome the subjective and objective limits of our current world, dominated as it is by capitalism and all its oppressive ramifications; in other words, if the idea is to make possible a politics of emancipation in Africa, it is imperative to develop concepts and categories which make alternatives thinkable and thereby possible. Moreover, if currently hegemonic perspectives make it impossible to …
Are Those-Who-Do-Not-Count Capable of Reason? Thinking Political Subjectivity in the (Neo-)Colonial World and the Limits of History
This article is concerned to show that the historical science of the (neo-)colonial world is unable to allow for an analysis of the political subjectivities of 'those-who-do-not-count' or 'subalterns' as rational beings. Rather, it can only think such subjectivities as the products of people who are merely bearers of their social location, not thinking subjects. As a result, such history can only be a history of place, not a history of the transc…
From 'Foreign Natives' to 'Native Foreigners: Explaining Xenophobia in Post-apartheid South Africa - Citizenship and Nationalism, Identity and Politics
Thinking Freedom in Africa: Toward a theory of emancipatory politics
Constructing the domain of freedom: Thinking politics at a distance from the state
Political emancipation in the twenty-first century must be conceived and achieved through establishing a ‘distance’ from the state and its practices. This article argues that in order to begin to understand politics ‘at a distance from the state’, we need to first understand politics as a collective thought-practice. The thought of an emancipatory politics exists only when collective subjectivities exceed the limits imposed by social place, ident…
The Sociology of Crisis and the Crisis of Sociology: Academic Marxism and the Absence of a Thought of Politics in South Africa
Thinking Freedom in Africa: Toward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics
Previous ways of conceiving the universal emancipation of humanity have in practice ended in failure. Marxism, anti-colonial nationalism and neo-liberalism all understand the achievement of universal emancipation through a form of state politics. Marxism, which had encapsulated the idea of freedom for most of the twentieth century, was found wanting when it came to thinking emancipation because social interests and identities were understood as s…
The Creolization of Political Theory and the Dialectic of Emancipatory Thought: A Plea for Synthesis
The paper discusses Jane-Anna Gordon's important idea of the Creolization of Poitical Theory with reference to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Frantz Fanon. It makes an argument for synthesizing this initiative with dialectical thought in order to transcend the analytical vision which gave birth to the creolizing of theory. This synthesis is proposed in order to make sense of the real of any politics of universal emancipation and to incorpo…
The academic intellectual as knowing subject and the reason of the excluded: A response to Mahmood Mamdani
Mamdani’s review of my book Thinking Freedom in Africa remains within the analytical binaries which characterise his thinking. As a result he fails completely to comprehend my argument. The problem is compounded by the fact that he seems, at best, to have read the book only partially. I do not oppose “differences” to “universal humanity”, but argue that in order to understand a politics of emancipation on the African continent, one must begin fro…
African Politics of Survival Extraversion and Informality in the Contemporary World
Popular Sovereignty versus State Sovereignty: Haiti, Popular Equality and the Birth of the Neocolonial State
Through a review of the two works below, I discuss how the Saint Domingue/Haiti Revolutions clarify the history of the opposition between popular sovereignty and state sovereignty. The people and the state developed as distinct political actors throughout the nineteenth century in particular. The former constructed a completely new society founded on egalitarian norms influenced by African cultures. The latter failed to establish its sovereignty …
Political science (22 works) · Politics (21 works) · Law (19 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (14 works) · Political economy (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · State (computer science (7 works) · Emancipation (6 works)